Around Seattle and NCECA with a camera

I'm now at the point where I'm not telling stories about NCECA, but posting visual impressions. Soon I'll be making pots again and posting my own work from here on the Cape. (In fact, I'm building an Etsy store now ... more about that in a day or so.) But I always carry a camera and I always get visual impressions of things far from home. So ... here's a look at a few things from last week in the great city of Seattle, not all of it necessarily clay-related.

- Top, these two young women were trying to figure out what book the Chinese astronauts were reading in this sculpture by Xu Yihui. They were all over the lot and never once thought of Mao's Little Red Book. I told them that in the mid-'60s Chinese leader Mao Xedong's thoughts were collected in these tiny red books with plastic covers and that even students in the US had them. Even if, like mine, they were just a curiosity. They had never heard of the book, but of course it made perfect satirical sense to have two Chinese astronauts consulting Chairman Mao while walking on the moon.

- My contribution to the displays of pots at NCECA. This little window show was sponsored by Watershed in Maine, juried by Dylan Beck and on display at Fuel Coffee on Capitol Hill, some distance from the Washington State Convention Center. We went there to see the show and get coffee on the first morning we were in Seattle.

- One of the exhibition rooms on the sixth floor of the convention center, this one filled with displays by galleries from across the US. Full of wonderful pots and sculpture for sale.

- Far from NCECA, the koi swim in a pool at Swanson's, a garden and plant center and a place where Dee and our daughter-in-law spend money whenever we're in the city.

- About a block from the two POTS galleries is Lucky's Pho, a place to eat warm fragrant Vietnamese soup on a cool day in the Fremont neighborhood. This was my bowl of beef and meatball pho.